I dont know why, but every directory site i have started with php link directory does not do very well in search. If i were to create the same site in static or wordpress for example with the same link structure and url's it seems to do way better. Its almost like google penalizes phplinkdirectory sites. Has has anyone else noticed this?
nope its not like that google don't like phplinkdirectory. there might be various reasons "why your PHPLD sites are not ranking in Google". First is use of PHPLD free version. yes their free vesion is hopeless. phpld free version has major bug and that is yet not fixed. i.e. when you enter wrong URL e.g. http://domainname.tld/non-existing-page.ext should return 404 header. but it sends 200 header. although this bug is fixed in their paid version. this creates unlimited valid pages and crawler bot keeps crawling huge amount of wrong site structure. and this is very bad for SERPS second is your category & link optimization: meta tags play good role in this. also unique description about category helps. try to increase content vs. HTML code ratio of your directory. third is not very imp but it affects and that is how script handles content, design, URL rewrite. word press & static pages has little plus over PHPLD rewrite.
Wordpress is very SEO friendly with its tableless templates. They also have excellent relations with google, unlike phpLD. Google doesn't like phpLD due to built in reciprocal linking, paid links, no default use of nofollow etc etc. This is what I have interpreted in time and with comments that Cutts has made.
To create a directory, you must create a database driven web site. With the introduction of .Net and Microsofts very expensive licensing for their database, many of the developers that moved forward with dynamic programming move over to PHP and MySQL. Therefor PHP gets a bad rap which is totally wrong. It was just no one used .Net to make a directory let alone a "link directory". With that said, Google ranks the link directory site very low due to the lack of "text" content. For those site that had high page rank and sold links, Google solved that by penalizing the sites to PR1. Now the sold links have no value. Now, if you add a reciprocal linking series of pages to Wordpress, it will also get hammered like normal Web sites. And finally, to the early PHP CMS systems, they were not SEO friendly and contained excessive (code bloat) code. Wordpress has learned from the early mistakes like we did.
Im almost convinced google specifically penalizes phpld. What are some other options other than phpld, even paid scripts?